Pictures in Time

Do you take photographs of the runners? she asked.

Oh yes! Well, no. What do I say?

I owned a camera once, no twice. What I found both times was that when I went to take a photograph, the camera always got in the way somehow.

I think in pictures, talk in pictures. I hear the word photograph, and photographs are all I can see. Finished images argue like children talking, tugging at my sleeve, trying to tell their after-school stories. Details steal my attention so completely, drawing me, pulling me, taking my breath so much so that thoughts of other realities leave my hands to be set aside. The camera is an afterthought left behind with the rest of my life.

I can’t escape the art I see in the ordinary. It fascinates me. I become all curiosity.

Do you see that pencil on that sheet of paper? It sits at an angle across some words. Just above it and off-center, the handwritten word triage is circled, and to the left are the words inside me. One inch further left sits a cell phone, closing a triangle that goes from pen to words to phone. A story begins about a telephone call that never came.

I don’t take photographs. I have no camera.

I hold beautiful images in my mind.

I share them with you when I tell their stories.

I am a writer.

My photographs are word pictures set in time.

−me strauss Letting me be